Book Review

  • The Apollo Murders, Chris Hadfield

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House Canada, 2021, 470 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-7352-8235-3

    Criticizing Chris Hadfield is not recommended up here in Canada—he’s as close to a national hero as we’ve got—an astronaut with impeccable professional credentials, an entertainer’s flair and a high media profile.   His rendition of “Space Oddity” is legendary—the first music video performed and shot in space.   I didn’t have to think twice when I happened to see a copy of his first novel, The Apollo Murders, at a nice discount at the local Wal-Mart—it was an instant buy.

    Considering how deeply I admire Hadfield, it brings me no joy to reluctantly find issues with The Apollo Murders—but even admiration should not prevent honest criticism when it’s warranted. It pains me even more considering that The Apollo Murders squarely plays into one of my favourite sub-genres of fiction: the immensely detailed techno-thriller, blended with a good chunk of space program secret history and a one-big-idea-a-chapter narrative drive. There are plenty of reviews elsewhere on this site to testify how I’m not afraid of good long exposition dumps, plotting-dominant functional prose, wild ideas and techno-geek vocabulary. Hadfield’s novel has all of this.

    The first few pages set the tone, as we are brought back to the 1970s. Our hero is someone not unlike Hadfield himself—a test pilot turned astronaut, with guitar-playing skills. It’s not meant to be an exact alter ego, of course—In the first chapter, our protagonist (an American) loses an eye due to a plane/bird collision, and other differences abound. Think of it as a way for Hadfield to write about what he knows without necessarily self-inserting himself in the novel.

    As the novel advances, it’s clear that we’ve hopped into a slightly alternate dimension where the Apollo program didn’t stop when it did in this universe—Apollo 18 is on the launchpad, and the tensions of the Cold War are heavily informing its secret mission. Overloading his narrative with juicy thriller elements, Hadfield has the mission launched not only to go to the moon, but to take a look at a Soviet orbital station along the way. It gets much, much wilder when someone sneaks aboard an Apollo module that already has a Soviet sleeper agent, and the drama goes all the way to the moon and back. By cramming a full thriller on top of an Apollo mission procedural, Hadfield has a lot of things to talk about.

    There are, to my delight, a lot of technical details along the way, and a re-use of odd bits and pieces of Cold War gadgets—many abandoned plans, bizarre ideas and half-baked concepts all make an appearance here, blending fact and fiction with a credible sheen of things that only an astronaut would think about including in the narrative. There’s an appendix specifying what is real, and far more of it is than you’d think. The publisher’s blurb namechecks The Martian and The Hunt for Red October, and that’s an accurate triangulation. (For specialists, I’d throw in other points of closer comparison—Edward Gibson’s Reach, Homer Hickam’s Back to the Moon, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens’s Freefall, even David Onley’s Shuttle if you’re old-school Canadian about it.)  I’m not going to criticize the engineer’s approach to detail in the novel—it was one of my favourite things about it.

    Where I’m a bit more neutral is in the actual nuts-and-bolts writing of the novel. Look, I’m a Science Fiction fan—I’m not usually bothered by clunky prose. But time and time again, I found myself looking at sentences and wondering if there wasn’t a better way of phrasing them. The good news is that this brings further credence to the working theory that Hadfield did not use a ghost writer like so many celebrity writers—and further evidence for this can also be found in the other books he’s published.

    Where I have far more serious doubts about The Apollo Murder is in overall structure and plotting. My biggest complaint, probably idiosyncratic, is that it seemed to me as if the novel was building to a moon-set climax, but then kept going long after that highlight passed, to ever-diminishing returns in terms of thrills. I get that the entire Apollo trip to the Moon and back was the operating framework for structuring the novel, but there’s something in the way it builds up tension for a specific point in the story, and then doesn’t deal with it effectively. This means that the last third of the story becomes less and less effective, which is a singularly damaging impression for a story that should end with a strong climax. I’m not sure what the problem is exactly, but it felt as if the novel peaked far too soon, and couldn’t commit to an appropriate resolution afterward.

    Other nagging issues include an inconsistent sense of claustrophobia (considering that most of the novel takes place in a very small enclosed space with more than one antagonist), a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward its Soviet characters (something no doubt informed by Hadfield’s experiences in Russia, but frustratingly out-of-focus), an equally-weird lack of indignation about the US going to space to sabotage another space exploration effort, some wonky handwaving about whether Apollo 18 is really a secret, and other little bits of unfinished business throughout it all.

    Note that I’m not really taking away any points for a ludicrous plot that ignores NASA’s decades-long history of careful planning and risk-averse decision-making: Having the mission merrily trucking to the Moon after an act of orbital piracy goes horribly wrong is part of the fun of an exuberant space thriller. It’s within that plot structure that I have issues with how things are developed. The execution undermines the premise in inconsistent but cumulative ways.

    It’s pretty clear to me that The Apollo Murders would not have been published as-is had someone else’s name been on the cover—any strong editorial guidance would have pared down some subplots, revised a good chunk of the book’s last third, and arranged for plot elements to come together in a more propulsive way. But that’s one of the privileges of fame and public goodwill—you can write what you want, few will dare question it and the result may even dazzle readers for whom this is something fresh and new. (For seasoned genre readers, Hadfield’s promotional interviews for the novel are best avoided—the lack of awareness of the space program secret history subgenre is understandable but frustrating.)  But more critical readers may not be so kind. In the end, I’m left unsatisfied—I like a lot of The Apollo Murders, but those parts I didn’t are too significant to ignore.

  • Double Negative: The Black Image & Popular Culture, Racquel J. Gates

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Duke University Press, 2018, 236 pages, ISBN 978-1-4780-0054-9

    I get my book recommendations from the weirdest places, and that’s the fun of it. In early 2022, academic Raquel J. Gates suddenly popped up twice in my pop-culture radar. She was an invited host on Turner Classic Movies, introducing one of my favourite films of the early 1940s—Stormy Weather—in terms I resonated with. And then she showed up again introducing the Criterion Channel’s April 2022 “Beyond Blaxploitation” event, again in a way I found interesting. I looked her name up on Amazon, saw that she had a recent book called Double Negative, and ordered it.

    It turned out to be a great pick. While clearly an academic book (that is: written by an academic, published by a university press, dense in footnotes—45 of the book’s 249 pages are made of notes, references and an index), it’s a breezily readable exploration of cultural issues of relevance to black (and white) America.

    It all gets off to a great start with “Negativity and the Black Popular Culture” as introduction—in a few pages, Gates defines her topic of interest as slightly disreputable culture (I don’t think I can get away with using “ratchetness” in the fullness of the expression as she does)—mirroring Chris Rock with Katt Williams, going from Flava Flav to Barack Obama as black signifiers, and going from those examples to a broader discussion of the African American community as encompassing and embracing all of those examples—from the reality TV “housewives” to the aspiration represented by the Ava Duvernay Barbie, with so-called negative portrayals of blackness often making space for charged discussions that would not occur in more genteel settings. There’s some thick material for thought here, engaging with the cultural vernacular and contextualizing it against history, politics and the media.

    The rest of the book works within that context. Chapter 1 tackles a close examination of Coming to America, and specifically how Eddie Murphy influenced the meaning of the film over its (white) director John Landis. Chapter 2 is about a quartet of “sellout films of the 1990s” (less familiar titles that had a fraught relationship with black identity). Chapter 3 studies the performances of Halle Berry, both as an actress and as a celebrity, charting a complicated history regarding her acceptance and roles as a black actress. Finally, the last chapter delves into black reality television—specifically Love & Hip Hop and Basketball Wives—, finding much value in so-called lowbrow culture. An envoi discussing Empire felt timely given the book’s publication date.

    Having seen the film not too long ago, I found the Coming to America discussion fascinating—especially in attempting to establish the primary influences on the film and how that has helped it become a major touchpoint for Black America. While the first chapter had me nodding along at familiar material, the second had me taking notes on unfamiliar and decidedly lower-profile movies. The Halle Berry chapter was a great exercise in making interesting arguments out of familiar tabloid and entertainment news. I was slightly less compelled by the reality TV chapter, but that’s largely for lack of familiarity with the shows being discussed. (Although I was back on-board in discussing Empire, having seen all of its first season.)

    I am not doing Gates a favour by summarizing Double Negative so succinctly, because there is a lot of fascinating material here. Trying to give a longer summary would probably expose how I haven’t understood a single thing about the book (a fair charge, given how far I am from the topics of the book as a white French-Canadian man). But what I can articulate is just how much fun the book is to read. There’s a welcome mixture of academic rigour and popular accessibility here, with the sometimes-exasperating academic trait of overly explaining things here coming across as an enthusiastic invitation to match Gates’ understanding of the topics being discussed.

    I’ve read too many engaging academic papers to be surprised at just how much Double Negative held my attention, but even by those standards it’s an unusually successful melding of intellectual firepower and cultural awareness. There’s a good idea on every other page, and Gates weaves everything into a compelling narrative. At a time where cultural discussions online seem to be all rapid-fire hot takes with considerable velocity but no depth, it was a treat to sit back with a sustained, well-articulated argument that really dug into its examples of discussion, finding nuance and context in unusual places. It’s unusually interesting to be asked to reconsider what’s accepted to be good and what’s accepted to be bad and how this leads us to different places in defining meaning. Flava Flav is no Sidney Poitier, but then again no one is either Flava Flav or Sidney Poitier, and the drive to define blackness by its more admirable examples is also a disservice to everyone.

    I was so impressed after reading the book that I then did something unusual—I tracked down Gates’ email address and sent a fan letter. I don’t usually do this, but it felt like a nice gesture to let someone know when they’ve done something great. And now I’m taking my message to you, dear readers—if you have any interest in the racial cultural discourse in the United States, Double Negative should be on your reading list. Heck, if you’ve even seen Coming to America or Halle Berry or Empire, there’s something for you here as well. Accept random reading recommendations—you never know where they’ll take you.

  • Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, Laurie Woolever

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ecco, 2021, 442 pages, C$36.99, ISBN 978-0-06-290910-7

    I don’t usually go for celebrity worship, and most obituaries of public figures don’t create as much grief for me as for others. Let’s keep parasocial relationships in perspective: Someone I don’t even know dies? Well, that’s terrible. They will be missed, and my sympathies go to those who knew them. But I usually won’t make much of a fuss on social media or otherwise.

    But Anthony Bourdain’s death in 2018? That was another story. It hit much harder. Yes, I react more to writers dying than other types of celebrities—the consequence of being a big reader from childhood on. But even then: Bourdain, man… Just click on his name tag below this review and you’ll understand why I held him in such high esteem.

    It wasn’t just his death, it was the manner of his death: suicide, hanging himself while he was out travelling and recording another episode of his exceptional TV series. Right after getting his heart broken by none other than actress Asia Argento. For someone who exuded as much sheer joie de vivre as him, writing hard-hitting books that celebrated life as much as food, it seemed incomprehensible. Or rather, as incomprehensible as anyone we don’t really know—depression is a dangerous head-mate, and even the most authentic of celebrities never fully reveal themselves to their audiences.

    Apparently, I wasn’t the only one struggling to come up with an answer. Three years later, Bourdain’s life is now the topic of a documentary film, Roadrunner, and an oral biography assembled by one of Bourdain’s editors. (An unauthorized biography is also reportedly just around the corner.)

    Can an answer be found in Laurie Woolever’s Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography? Well, yes, somewhat. Among many other things.

    While I don’t think that oral biographies can fully replace a knowledgeable biographer, they have their own specific place in allowing knowledgeable friends and family members to tell their perspective. The role of the oral biographer is to cull everything into a coherent whole, preferably one that flows well from one intervention to another.

    So, we find in the list of interviewees an impressive selection of family members, celebrities who regularly interacted with Bourdain, companions-in-arms of his earlier ventures, and other people with stories to tell. One of the most interesting contributors, for instance, is Anderson Cooper, who shares a few memories of working with Bourdain, but also his own reflections on the difficult relationship anyone can have with celebrity, and what remains when the cameras are turned off and you end up alone in a hotel room far from home.

    Arranged mostly in chronological order, the biography takes us through the familiar beats of Bourdain’s life, but in greater detail than I’ve seen in any other form—including Bourdain’s own writings. Special attention must be paid to the years during which a younger Bourdain lived fast and hard in New York City streets—cooking with a rogue gallery of miscreants, doing drugs, unsuccessfully trying to become a published writer, and hardly thinking about the long term. Bourdain, not to mince words, was an addict, did bad things and, frankly, did not expect to live much longer.

    Keep that in mind, because that’s probably the key to the rest of the story. Unlike many cooks and addicts who burn out early, Bourdain found an unlikely second act as a celebrity food writer, and then became a TV show host, his celebrity exploding far beyond that would have been reserved for him as even a best-selling writer. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Bourdain’s ascension into pop culture became a lifeline—that if it had not taken place, what ended up happening would have happened earlier.

    None of this is comfort for those who miss him, for the family and friends he leaves behind, and for those who would just like another book, another column, or another episode. But it does make everything just a bit more understandable.

    It’s not a perfect oral biography, though—while Woolever does great work conducting interviews and whipping them up into a coherent whole, she should have intervened more often to establish context and smooth over some of the transitions. Even for Bourdain fans, it’s not a given that every facet of his public life is familiar, and there are junctures in which even a line or two of context would have been very helpful.

    If you’re wondering how this oral biography compares to the documentary Roadrunner, rest assured that the portrait is very similar—after all, more or less the same people are interviewed for both. But while the documentary manipulated a few things for dramatic effect, and restrained itself from casting blame on Argento, the book is both far more detailed and less coy about its conclusions, with several interviewees squarely pointing a finger at Argento’s actions. On the other hand, many of the most informative sound-bites come from the film—David Chang’s reminder that “at the end of the day, Tony’s dark as f-ck, man” or David Choe’s “I mean, he ran for a long time, but you’re not gonna outsmart pain” encapsulates a lot about Bourdain in a few words. And you can understand how people would be harsh on him—his self-destruction left behind a large production crew in an abominable situation and, unforgivably, a young daughter.

    If you’re looking for a definite answer about why, you won’t get it. But the elements of a credible answer are there—his own personality and temperament, his increasingly ambivalent relationship with fame, and the Argento breakup that clearly had a huge influence. Blend all of this together, peek behind the scenes of glamour, remind yourself that depression isn’t rational, and what happened is what happened.

    The whole thing makes for bittersweet reading, as with any raucous wake: we get many more anecdotes of just how cool, how passionate, how literate, and how friendly Bourdain could be, but we do so knowing that he is no longer with us. As far as epitaphs go, however, Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography is a far better one than most. You get Bourdain at a remove, but you get more of him for just a while longer.

  • Too Much and Never Enough, Mary L. Trump

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2020, 225 pages, C$37.00 hc, ISBN 978-1-9821-4146-2

    Dunbar’s number, for the lucky ones encountering the concept for the first time, is roughly 150. What it refers to is, quoting Wikipedia’s pithy summary, “A suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.” Or, loosely reformulated, the number of people in your life that you know well enough to, well, care for them. This does not necessarily mean liking them—for various reasons, some people included in your Dunbar number’s gallery of rogues are people you don’t like, but need to understand in order to organize your life—maybe bad bosses, unpleasant uncles, dour neighbours or other people with impact or authority over your life. The number stays roughly the same, but the people included in the group change as your life changes.

    As with many pieces of sociological research vulgarized for lay audiences, Dunbar’s number can be used and interpreted in a number of ways. I would suggest that, with weaker interpersonal ties in modern life, our 150 spots are often filled by parasocial relationships—celebrities we obsess about without them knowing about it: actors, authors, public personalities and… politicians.

    (Speaking of politicians—From various tales and my own infrequent meetings with them, I’m convinced that many career politicians have brains that can handle a much higher Dunbar number than 150 as part of their “tribe,” which they develop by training their memory—Bill Clinton, for one, was famous for recalling trivial facts about people years after briefly meeting them.)

    Where I’m going with this is simple: I utterly loathe that once-President Donald J. Trump currently occupies one of the 150 slots of my own personal Dunbar roster.

    It makes no sense for this to happen. I’m not even American. Trump is a miserable person who would, in an alternate timeline when he stayed real estate “mogul,” usually be dismissed as being unworthy of notice. I should have more friends in that 150-person group. Instead, I’m stuck with a mental model of someone who rants in ALL CAPS on social media. Sad!

    But the truth is that Trump now occupies a slot in the Dunbar’s roster of millions of people. He was a man of considerable power, and wielded this power unpredictably, making seat-of-the-pant declarations that weren’t even always understandable. It’s normal that millions of people (probably hundreds of millions of people) spent a considerable amount of time creating a mental model of him in order to understand, predict and maybe even encourage his actions.

    But all of us stuck in this abusive parasocial relationship with Trump have a marked disadvantage over his niece Mary L. Trump, author of the family history Too Much and Never Enough: we don’t really know him. Even those of us poor souls who spent most of his presidency devouring political news for every twitch and tweet of his administration weren’t there. We don’t know what was filtered, made up, mythologized or exaggerated about him. But Mary was present during Donald’s formative years. She celebrated holidays at the same house. She saw him grow up. Furthermore, she obtained a psychology degree, making her far more of an adept observer of human nature than most of us. (And the family link means that her adherence to the Goldwater Rule isn’t as necessary as for others.)  As for the rest, remember that Mary was essentially excommunicated from Donald’s circles due to shenanigans surrounding the estate of Trump’s father—dubious actions that led to her filing a lawsuit, and plenty of discovery documents ending in her possession. What’s more, it’s safe to say that Mary doesn’t agree with Republican policies. You say disgruntled—I say clear-eyed.

    I have spent dozens of hours trying to understand Donald, poring over his biography, his actions, and the reactions of those who were closer to him than I ever will be. But Too Much and Never Enough still had a lot to teach me.

    If you’re expecting a full psychological portrait of Donald, you can be reassured that the book is more subtle than that—at its best, it’s a chronicle of the Trump family, taking us in the New York City mansion that acted as the gathering place of the family, the life of Fred Trump (father of Donald) and the tumultuous history of the family through the decade. Mary has a special space in the narrative for her own father, Fred Jr., who died prematurely in 1980. But it’s the twisted family dynamics of the Trump family that hold our attention—a mixture of wealth and regrettable psychological traits, an overbearing patriarch (Fred Sr.) whose pattern of selectively doling and withholding affection set a toxic example for the rest of the family.

    It’s a unique tell-all glimpse at the formative influences of Donald at a far more basic level than most biographers manage to create—it’s like spending Christmas with Trump, and seeing him at his worst when threatened by people formerly close to him. How nasty were the Trumps? Well, how about cutting off health insurance to an 18-month-old baby nephew with serious medical conditions? The book is damning in detailing Trump’s wealth (or relative lack thereof) but it’s at its best in its family portrait.

    As I write this, I still haven’t managed to fully purge Donald from my Dunbar gallery—obstinately, he clings to the spotlight and may even rise again as the Republican nominee for the presidency. I suppose that’s the other side of the coin: How can you stop caring about a narcissist who keeps turning the spotlight toward him?

  • Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 2021, 416 pages, C$12.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0063112520

    Novelizations live in a strange corner of the literary universe. They literally exist to adapt in prose a story told in another medium, usually as squarely mercantile effort. I won’t belittle the authors of novelizations – while they’re rarely the authors of the original screenplay on which the novelization is based, they’re asked to do a quasi-impossible task on tight deadlines, transforming an outline of a story into a readable novel. Some of them do better jobs than others, fixing plot points, making the technical details more plausible, adding credible backstories and executing in prose form moments that were designed for the screen. I still have a fond memory of the very entertaining Down with Love adaptation, and Orson Scott Card’s legendary work on adapting The Abyss actually fed into the movie itself. Cinephiles often looked at novelizations to get glimpses of scenes cut during editing, or get a second-hand glimpse at information included in the script that may not have been all that clear in the finished product. In the luckiest of cases, you had the screenplay author writing or co-writing the novelization.

    Novelizations, inevitably, are not what they once were. Originally produced in a context where movies played on the big screen for a few weeks and then disappeared forever, they became far less important once home video offered wider availability and endless replays. In an age of streaming, they often feel like relics of a rougher age, like VHS video stores and DVD audio commentary. (Keep in mind that I liked all of those and wish they’d be back.)

    Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gloriously revels in the nostalgia aspect of, well, nearly everything about it. Movie or novel, it remains a story set in 1969, looking back at the fashions, obsessions and characters of the time, and the quaintly charming feeling of a novelization clearly plays along the same lines. Much as Tarantino paid homage to a past generation of actors and filmmakers, it makes sense that a novelization would also tap into the movie marketing of an earlier age. Even the design of the book harkens back to the yellowing paperbacks of the era – the only thing missing being the Bantam rooster.

    But this isn’t a simple novelization. For one thing, obviously, it’s from Tarantino himself – the book is from the same creative mind as the movie, and it doesn’t take a long time for the book to show that it’s a different riff. Whatever stories, anecdotes, telling details and strange connections that Tarantino couldn’t fit in the movie are brought forth here. From the acknowledgement page (which thanks notables such as Bruce Dern and Burt Reynolds), we understand that the project, filmed or written, was largely driven by conversations with acting legends who were active back in 1969, and there’s a clear intention to capture those recollections in more permanent form. (If you’re aware of Reynolds’ past as a stuntman, you can almost feel his stories weaved into the narrative.)

    As with most novelizations, we get a deeper look at the characters themselves – Rick Dalton’s inner struggles as an actor are far more detailed, as is the very troubled past of his deuteragonist Cliff Booth. We get access to their inner monologue, and the characters become richer for it. Dalton’s innate goodness is amplified, but the biggest surprise here is Booth’s violent streak. From a record body count in World War II to the violent murder of two mafiosos to the confirmation that he did intentionally kill his wife (an event often referred to in the film, but here detailed in gruesome detail), Booth does not come across as well in the book – absent Brad Pitt’s charisma and his biggest heroic moment (I’ll explain in two paragraphs), he comes across as a very scary, utterly ruthless character who just happens to be hanging with a likable protagonist. Ironically, the one moment that annoyed many people in the film, his confrontation with an atypically arrogant Bruce Lee, is considerably softened here – it’s obvious from the narrative that Lee’s lack of coordination over his “mock” fights with other stuntmen had left many bloodied, and Booth is on set as a “ringer” explicitly to teach Lee a bruising lesson.

    But there’s more to it. Tarantino, basking in the creative freedom of his literary debut (he’s had many screenplays published in book form before, but never a prose narrative), gets to add scenes, digressions and heartfelt rants. When Booth reflects upon his cinematic likes and dislikes, it’s as if we get a good film critic’s rant from Tarantino himself. When Polanski showboats as a director, it’s hard to say whether this is Tarantino reflecting on his own art. There’s a sequence featuring a deeply alcoholic Aldo Ray that allows Tarantino to expound on his admiration for the fallen actor. If you wanted to learn more about Charles Manson’s improbable musical career as he turned murderous cult leader, it’s right here even if, thankfully, the novel doesn’t spend a lot of time with Manson and his acolytes. There are even two chapters written as if from a western novel, as even the pilot-show-within-a-movie Lancer gets its own expansion.

    More crucially, Tarantino also gets to mess around with his own story. If you’re expecting a retelling of the film with additional details, page 123 will slap you across the face, as it summarizes not only the event of the film’s third act and climax, but gives a flash-forward to Dalton’s revitalized career throughout the 1970s. In other words, the climax of the novel is not going to be the climax of the film, and the two works diverge considerably. Don’t expect different events – but expect a climax with a different emphasis, preoccupied not with a hippie-face-smashing action climax, but with Dalton regaining confidence in his own powers as an actor. Technically, the novel ends two thirds of the way into the film — The rest is handled in flashforwards, including one chapter skipping six months later inserted at the fourth-fifth mark. For fans of the film, you can clearly see the appeal of the book – it’s recognizably from the same origin, but it eventually does its own thing.

    One of the big questions for a story set in 1969 and about 1969 is how credible it is in its references. I obviously can’t tell from first-hand experience, but after years of immersion in Hollywood history, I was impressed at the depths of some of Tarantino’s references throughout the film. There’s a deft interweaving of fact and fiction here, with some very deep cuts to lesser-known films (geez, Cukor’s The Chapman Report?) that don’t feel like Tarantino merely repeating reference works. (Which is surprisingly obvious – you can tell they’re references, but they don’t jell together. Here they do.)

    I quite liked the result. Tarantino’s prose style is not always smooth – his strength is clearly in dialogue and storytelling, not necessarily in strong descriptive writing. The novel is told at the present tense, which echoes the way that screenplays are written, but quickly becomes useful as the novel skips back in time to tell stories of 1950s/60s Hollywood, then flashes forward for glimpses of what the future awaits for some characters (including one who gets nominated three times for Oscars in the 1980s/90s – first for a role played in our reality by Elizabeth McGovern, another by Meg Tilly, and a final one in a Tarantino film that doesn’t exist in this timeline). But as an alternate take on a pretty good film, it’s a rather wonderful companion that bifurcates just enough to keep things interesting. It’s obviously indulgent, digressive and showy – in other words, qualities that we’ve come to associate with Tarantino’s films themselves. It could have been a better-controlled narrative with more polished prose that stuck closer to the film, but then it may not have been a Tarantino novel. If his longstanding promise of retirement from directing comes to pass (it won’t), I can see a pretty good career ahead of him as a writer.

    In the meantime, there’s the novelization that’s more than a novelization – it’s a great book about 1969 Hollywood as well, a quirky novel and a gift to fans of the film. In fact, it may make you like the film even more – I revisited it right after finishing the novel and, coupled with more reasonable assumptions about the film’s pacing and narrative structure, had arguably an even better time than the first viewing.

     

     

     

  • Superman: Action Comics Vol. 8: Truth, Greg Pak, Aaron Kuder

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    DC Comics, 2016, 192 pages, C$22.00 tp, ISBN 978-1401262631

    I’ve made a commitment to get back into reading in 2021, and part of easing myself into it was to go through my superheroes comic book backlog. Considering that most of them take at most 30 minutes to get through, it seemed like an ideal way to get into a bedtime routine. Plus, is there anything less fun than a stack of unread comic books?

    The problem was that I had quite a stack. Over the past six months, the local dollar store somehow got its hands on boxes and boxes of trade paperbacks superhero comics, selling them at fractions of their original prices. I usually grabbed a few every time I was in the store, and by the time Quebec went into its third lockdown (with “non-essentials” such as books being forbidden for sale), I had nowhere to go and a nice three-foot pile of trade paperbacks with a smattering of hardcovers to go through. Most of the stack was published from 2013 to 2017, and most of it from DC — in other words, reprints of the four-year era that followed the 2011 “New 52” reboot but was itself replaced by the 2016 “Rebirth” reboot. (Which, if you’re keeping track at home, was itself replaced by the 2018 New Justice event — comics are not a sane industry.)

    While this review is titled Superman: Truth, I’m not going to specifically comment at length on that specific book. I selected it as a title because it represents a good yardstick through which to approach the modern comic book trade paperback era: It’s not too bad and not too good, showing both the strengths and weaknesses of the very specific way that superhero comic books approach their material. It’s also incredibly interconnected to other books in the stack, making it a good access point through which to approach the rest. Consider this as a brain-dump of sorts of what I thought about while going through the stack of books, being alternately entertained and frustrated by what I was reading.

    Let’s be clear from the onset: While I’m generally aware of superheroes, I’ve never been a big fan. Sure, I like Batman (or, more specifically, the universe of characters around Batman) and I have accumulated a smattering of the subgenre’s most noteworthy trade paperbacks over the year. But I was never a regular fixture at the comic book store. Even today, the “comics” section of my library is dominated by graphic novels rather than superhero books. I’ve always found the Marvel/DC universes to be intensely self-referential, with hundreds of supporting characters that only fans with long memories and deep pockets could hope to place in their proper context. This backlog of accumulated history is never consistent, and the various continuity reboots should be recognized as promotional events rather than honest attempts to straighten out a continuity that was never rigorous in the first place. (When subsequent reboots reboot the reboots, well, they’re not doing it out of creative purity.)

    Trying to read Superman: Truth, for instance, means loading up on Wikipedia (oh, thank goodness for its ludicrously detailed articles!) to figure out where it fits in the continuity, what happened to Superman right before and who are those characters. In my stack of trade paperbacks, for instance, I had not only Superman: Truth, but Superman: Before Truth and Superman/Wonder Woman: Truth Hurts, all of which had to be read in order to get a sense of the continuity. These days, you can consider yourself lucky if a self-contained dramatic arc is concluded in a single book, as the trade paper collections span multiple arcs and sometimes bring together stories published in separate sub-lines of books. (Alas, it’s those books bringing back everything together that often end up being more confusing, due to writers approaching overall events from different perspectives. I’m still trying to figure out Justice League United, for instance, despite or because it brings together stories from three different lines.)  At other times, you get lucky in reading a title from early in the continuity reboot — it’s fun and accessible to see the individual stories of the characters populating Justice League of America: Road to Rebirth being rebuilt from scratch, for instance, even though the book ends just as they get together.

    This is why, over time, I’ve learned to consider superheroes as metastable archetypes. You apply your knowledge of them from other sources onto the specific story being told. They may have core characteristics that carry over time, but various writers and artists are free to shape them into slightly different things over time. Some of those interpretations stick — others are forgotten or actively corrected. Writers may try new things to shock the audiences, or address modern concerns, or feel free to align the archetypes over topical matters. That’s the fun of constant reboots, alternate continuities, “elseworld” creative digressions and successive “runs” by different writers. Over time, for instance, I fully expect to see mainline continuities in which Bruce Wayne shot his parents, Superman is homosexual and Wonder Woman is a trans woman. (Note: All of this has already been featured in fanfiction.)  What usually doesn’t change is the core of the character — sullen vigilante Batman, righteous alien Superman, idealistic amazon Wonder Woman. Everything else is up for grabs.

    Sometimes, you even further define your characters by taking away what defines them. One of the reasons why I picked Truth for review, for instance, is that it’s part of an overall arc stripping Superman of what appears to define him: Not more superpowers, no more secret identity (Lois Lane tells the world he’s Clark Kent, and the world does not react favourably), the Fortress of Solitude locked away, friends killed or otherwise put out of action. It’s not necessarily a fun arc, but the Superman that ends up powering through this accumulation of misery is a far more interesting guy. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans, riding a motorcycle and still fighting against injustice, he feels significantly more approachable than the god-among-mortals typical approach. Not that we’d tolerate this deviation longer than strictly necessary: there’s always this expectation that things will go back to “normal” even if this normal often ends up slightly different from what came before.

    This metastability is an aspect of superhero mythology that non-regular readers may fail to appreciate. Every so often, some of the weird stuff being tried by the writers for the comic-book fan core makes it to the mainstream press: Superman dead! Captain America assassinated! Batman marries Catwoman! Spider-Man a widower! Of course, the headlines fail to mention that this is standard operating procedure for comics. Superman has died or been killed many times (sometimes brutally, as when Wonder Woman punches through his chest with a fistful of kryptonite in the grim dystopian Wonder Woman: Dead Earth, sometimes gently from a natural affliction in The Last Days of Superman), Captain America’s mantle will go to someone else before being rebooted at some point; Batman did not end up marrying Catwoman; and Spider-Man will eventually get back in a long-term relationship. From time to time, you can see the status quo vacillate: While Lois Lane has typically been Superman’s girlfriend/wife, some recent interpretations had him paired up with Wonder Woman — which I don’t like that for various reasons (much like the whole “Iron Man is adopted” dramatic arc is moronic), but time will tell whether this change will stick.

    The end point of this is that readers read superhero comics for characters rather than stories. While narrative is important, it doesn’t mean as much as consistency in a commercially-driven area where readers expect a known quality. Batman fans don’t want a Bruce Wayne that grows old, falls in love, gets married, spends time with his family and turns his philanthropy to preventative social programs. No: they want a sullen, emotionally-stunted, attachment-free Batman who wears Bruce Wayne as a disguise and punches villains all night long. Deviations are allowed only in how they play with the basic character while ensuring that the archetype remains commercially viable.

    Anyone with a reasonably objective perspective on superhero comic books (such as anyone weaned on prose fiction or non-franchise movies) will recognize that the Marvel/DC field is stuck in less-than-creative traps. People expect to read about their favourite characters, and that’s that. Even I can’t deny the appeal. One of the reasons why I’m more familiar with the Batman mythos is that I like a lot of the characters that revolve around him: Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Oracle, Poison Ivy (hmm, I sense a pattern…) are often more interesting than Batman. Elsewhere in superhero continuity, I’ll pretty much read anything with Lex Luthor, Iron Man or Captain America, but there are characters that I don’t like. Green Lantern is stupid from top to bottom (which makes reading things like the Lights Out event book useless), the Joker is overrated, and I rarely see the point of Aquaman. (Hilariously enough, his team-up book is called Aquaman and the Others and it’s deathly dull despite a promising espionage thriller focus.)

    If immersing myself in DC continuity for a few dozen trade paperbacks has done anything, it’s making me more marginally more sympathetic to the DC universe. While, on ideological grounds, I’m still marginally more sympathetic to the Marvel approach of conferring greatness to ordinary people rather than the godlike mythology of DC, familiarity does breed comfort. I’ve learned to like Wonder Woman a bit more, and Superman can be a really interesting character when placed in the right hands, dealing with thorny problems that don’t require physical strength. I still don’t like Batwoman very much (although this has more to do with the experimental art and writing on the series’ first arcs) and some of the cosmic narratives are as useless as they are obnoxious. For instance, the first two books of Justice League United are an unmitigated collection of nonsense: despite the promising “Canadian” focus, the series then flies off into space for a succession of meaningless fights among godlike beings that are never interesting. I would very much rather see narratives grounded in the real world, such as Superman: Truth making an effort to set Superman is a recognizable version of reality.

    This being said, comic books are rarely consistent in their approach. One intensely frustrating aspect of modern superhero comics is their tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. In Truth, for instance, the opening moments of the book are narratively grounded, generally believable, and then, oops, we go to a narrative tangent that dives deep into the more fantastical areas of the Superman universe, forgetting the promising plot threads set up in earlier instalments. I’m not sure if this is an artifact of the writing process very much centred on short issues only later collected in trade paperbacks, but it’s so consistent as to become a characteristic, and not an endearing one. When I say that Truth (and its most closely associated prequel and sequel) are inconsistent, this is what I mean: You can end up somewhere completely different, without any care for narrative consistency, tone or storytelling unity. No wonder I like one-shots or strongly planned arcs better!

    It also goes without saying that not all corners of the superheroic multiverse are worth exploring. For every intriguing deviation (such as the surprisingly uplifting street-level vision of an extinction event in the concluding volume of Captain America and the Mighty Avengers: Last Days), there’s garbage nonsense such as Batman Beyond 2.0 (taking the Batman mythology to a futuristic post-apocalypse), or the meaningless Earth 2: Society books (copies-of-copies of superheroes fighting in a pocket universe). It’s trash like this, featuring an endless procession of ludicrous characters spending pages fist-fighting or throwing mental energy beams and Kirby dots to each other that gives the genre a bad name. I would rather have an intriguing story than pages of meaningless fights.

    Tone is also important: While the superhero comic book field is not as relentlessly grim as it once was, the current zeitgeist is not exactly all fun and roses. Accordingly, one of my favourite titles in my stack was a reprint of Superman Action Comics that took a classical but incredibly light-hearted approach to Superman — it was a welcome change from the so-serious New 52. Batman is particularly prone to excesses of overly grim and dramatic material — although this paradoxically had me more appreciative than ever for Batman’s famous unwillingness to kill: if he did, his universe could be unbearable. (Also see: The Batman who Laughs.)

    Inevitably, reading such a mass of superhero trade paperbacks got me interested once again in the highlights of the genre over the past decade or two. My stack was not exactly the best of what the genre had to offer, and in today’s digital distribution environment, I didn’t have to leave my house to start looking at closing some arcs left untied by the books I had on-hand, or start poking once again at the best one-shots published in recent years. I could, for instance, be quite eloquent about the homerun that is the Harleen miniseries thoroughly and finely exploring how Dr. Harleen Quinzel became Harley Quinn. I could be just as enthusiastic talking about the wonderfully comforting All-Star Superman, the amusing Batman/Dickens crossover Noel, or the inspired take on Luthor. But that may have to wait another time, as those as not your usual superhero books and I had to wade through a lot of uninspired material before getting to those. Sometimes, you have to take a look at the honest average to figure things out.

    Unfortunately, this is not building up to any big revelations about the state of the art in superhero comics. It’s pretty much the same as it’s even been, albeit with better-than-ever colouring. The weaknesses and strengths of the form have remained for decades, and I don’t see any reason for them to change (although the move toward trade paperback has been a net plus, even with the often-odd stitching of dramatic arcs across books). It’s still very much a crowd speaking to each other, a fiction genre even more hermetic than most others. The recent invasion of movies by comic book tropes is not always a good thing for movies, but it may have been a shot in the arm for comic book fans, as their characters have been reimagined as more cohesive and more audience-friendly, without the baggage that often weighs down the comics themselves.

    Still, coming as I do from the prose fiction world, I can’t quite shake a sentiment of narrative emptiness after finally going through my metre-deep stack of accumulated trade paperbacks. In looking over the stack, I could remember the best ones, but many of the blander books all felt generic and interchangeable with very few clear individual narrative hooks, other than “this is about Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman,” further blurred by stories beginning in one book and ending in another. I hunger for something more, something more substantial and (most of all) something with a self-contained beginning and an end. I’ll read more standalone novels, taking risks in perhaps not liking new characters but ultimately not having to constantly look up the history of every new minor character that pops up.

    I’m probably not yet finished — I suspect that the local dollar store still has a few boxes of trade paperback to put on shelves and I’ll probably bring a few more of them home, even if I’m going to be more selective about my picks (this is the last time I’ve purchased a Green Lantern book, I swear). You know, just for the characters.

  • The Labyrinth Index [The Laundry Files 9], Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2018, 350 pages, $35.00 hc, ISBN 978-0356511085

    After the status-quo-shattering intensity of previous volume The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross takes the pacing of the Laundry Files series one notch down in The Labyrinth Index. But that’s still going at a brisk jogging pace, because this time around the series’ ensemble cast goes for a big target — rescuing the President of the United States from Fortress America.

    Taking a transatlantic breather is not a bad idea, considering the sweeping changes at home. If you recall the climax of the previous volume, the agents of the British occult agency responsible for protecting the world from trans-dimensional horrors suffered a significant setback when Her Majesty’s government became corrupted by the very horrors it needed to be protected from — the Agency officially dissolved, and a complete takeover of the country by a genocidal alien intelligence only prevented by making a deal with a slightly lesser evil.

    This being said, “a lesser evil” can still be an absolute nightmare when the book opens with an execution sanctioned by the government — a clear sign that things are getting unimaginably worse for the characters (as they usually do in any given Stross series). The new Prime Minister is a front for an extra-dimensional horror who’s willing to keep humans around as long as they amuse him (giving him an edge over those who simply want a worldwide consumption of souls), and as the plot gets going, our protagonists are given an insane mission with no opportunity to refuse. Not when the Prime Minister is redecorating London with an arch adorned with human skulls.

    It turns out that the news from the States is roughly as bad in the Laundry Universe as they were here from 2016 to 2020: The government has also been taken over by evil horrors from another dimension, with the added complication of the American government having incredible means at its disposal. The comparisons only go so far, though: In Stross’ reality, a somewhat sympathetic and competent president has been erased from the collective knowledge of the American population through occult means in the hope of usurping his lawful authority. (It’s about as weird as it sounds, but it does build on The Nightmare Stack’s ruminations on the power of even a symbolic figure in The Laundry’s universe.)  The New Management of the United Kingdom is sending a team of operatives to either rescue, capture or kill the President. Against them: nothing less than the entire intelligence, security and police establishment of America.

    Our narrator/protagonist this time around is Mhari, an ex-girlfriend of Bob Howard later turned into a vampire then given important positions inside The Laundry. But there’s quite an ensemble cast of characters with their own third-person narratives —The Labyrinth Index sets itself up as a three-ring circus of overlapping operatives in setting up its caper. It all comes together as well as a heist film, albeit with more supernatural chaos as things spin out of control.

    In the grand scheme of the series, this feels like an energetic breather episode. The suspense of a thriller operating deep behind enemy lines is captivating, but the focus here is on explaining the state of the series at this point in time rather than advancing things too quickly. There’s a lot to take in: The New Management of the United Kingdom and the state of an American government captured by the creatures it needed to keep out.

    Stross also puts a few pieces on the board to set up later episodes: There’s a hilariously formal PowerPoint presentation outline for a high-tech end-of-humanity plan to be implemented by the American military-industrial complex, but also hints of an even bigger game afoot with even more powerful players. If my narrative intuition is correct, this could be a glimmer of hope for the series’ eventual conclusion, keeping with its ongoing theme of applying a small amount of leverage to gain an advantage or prevent larger losses. It goes without saying that our cast of characters is not blind to the New Management’s brand of evil, but even contemplating rebellion against such powerful forces is going to be a multi-book project. (Not to mention the very scary American plan to hasten the end of the world…)

    But that’s for later. In the immediate scope of The Labyrinth Index, what we have is a good page-turner that brings together a number of characters and plot strands from previous volumes in order to advance the overarching narrative. Mhari is a good narrator, and there’s something interesting in seeing Stross both send his cast farther and farther away from stock humanity (even the team’s lone unmodified human is turned into something more along the way — something that feels like a loss) while working hard at ensuring that recognizable human traits manifest themselves in his superhuman characters — perhaps most notably by giving them stable and deepening romantic relationships.

    Not quite as good as The Delirium Brief (which was a bit of a high-water mark for the series) but better than many of the previous volumes, The Labyrinth Index does have Stross working in a familiar techno-espionage format, delivering good character work on a much broader canvas. It may be the last mainline Laundry novel for a while — in discussing future plans, Stross is deliberately skipping farther ahead in the Laundry universe chronology with his next trilogy of books, trying a slightly-different genre with new characters until he can come back to Bob Howard and friends to close out that specific arc. As a result, we may be a few years away from a direct sequel to The Labyrinth Index, leaving all of those delicious plot threads dangling for a few years. How that will work is anyone’s guess at this point, but Stross has proved time and time again that he knows what he’s doing. I may hold off on reading the upcoming trilogy until all three books are published: From my experience reading the last few volumes of The Laundry series, I may end up reading the entire trilogy in three days.

  • The Delirium Brief [The Laundry Files 8], Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2018, 384 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 978-1250196095

    Over a sufficiently long period of time, every spy series has an episode in which the agent goes rogue. (Well, except for the Mission: Impossible series, where it happens in nearly every film.)  With The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross takes The Laundry Files series one step further, by having the British government shut down the occult intelligence agency its protagonists are working for. Without warning, without delay — removing the sole agency responsible for keeping trans-dimensional horrors at bay. Mayhem ensues.

    Of course, there’s a reason for all this, and those play outside the narrative as well. After a trilogy of sometimes-disconnected entries in the series expanding its scope and cast of characters, The Laundry Files was in sore need of a disciplined escalation. As significant as the destruction of Leeds in the previous episode was instrumental in the series’ progression toward a Lovecraftian singularity, there was a feeling that previous episodes introduced various new characters and advanced the plot, but left plenty of material on the floor, just ready to be used more significantly.

    The Delirium Brief is the payoff. Not the entire payoff, but an opportunity for Stross to riffle through the mantelpieces of the seven previous volumes of the series and grab any artillery left around in order to push the series to the next level. With the notable exception of the second book’s Hades Blue (which was always been an odd fit in the rest of the series), nearly the entire surviving gang is back in action this time around, and that goes from the heroes to the villains.

    The barely-resolved climax of the previous book takes a much better place as this newest entry begins, with initial series protagonist “Bob Howard” (not his real name, not even a real human at this point in the series) being thrust in front of cameras to explain The Laundry’s lacklustre response to a trans-dimensional invasion with a five-figure body count. Bob is not a PR person. Bob would rather fiddle around with computers. But Bob is what the Laundry has left — as the government turns its unsympathetic attention toward the Laundry, two things soon become clear: It wants some heads to roll, and there’s a vastly eviler force behind it whispering that The Laundry should be eliminated. After an opening that squarely renews with the series’ roots in espionage thrillers, the action gets crackling as The Laundry is shut down. This isn’t your average fire-everyone pique: this means that essential services keeping horrors away from the Kingdom are suddenly interrupted, that most of the senior management of the organization is targeted for arrest and the various spells binding its employees are no longer effective.

    As someone with quite a bit of experience in Canada’s surprisingly benevolent public service, I had a bit of a problem with that section of the book on purely practical grounds — While the series’ depiction of the British civil service is often very similar to the Canadian experience, this specific bit rang incredibly false. But as Stross has explained at length, much of the novel was rewritten in the heat of the Brexit shock, perhaps as exemplary a breakdown of public stewardship as has been witnessed in the Westminster system. There are also the demands of fiction to consider: I can argue until tomorrow that this kind of wholesale firing would never pass muster with Canadian public service unions, the point here is to get all Laundry characters on the run, and actively plotting against their own government in order to save the realm.

    In that respect — whew, does The Delirium Brief work as intended. Even after a curiously dispassionate previous book in which a major British city is destroyed, this entry feels as if all the stops have been removed. The trans-dimensional horrors are taking over the British government, and our heroes are (as usual) fighting a desperate rear-guard action to save at least something of normalcy. The price to pay is considerable — not necessarily in terms of a body count, considering that even I was surprised at the number of main characters surviving to the end, but in terms of the compromises made to even eke out a smaller defeat. The situation is so desperate that the protagonists have to make terrifying compromises and league with a lesser evil… that’s still remarkably evil.

    As I’ve mentioned, for long-time series readers, this is the payoff. As Stross has often promised, this is the mid-point of the Lovecraftian singularity designated by CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Some retrofitting is necessary to make all of the narrative pieces fit together (notably in bringing back cultists and avatars of the Black Pharaoh), but it works well. The antagonist, represented by preacher Raymond Schiller (back from being left for dead in anther dimension at the end of the fourth book), is a repellent piece of work, with methods that bring moments of stomach-churning erotic horror. By this point of the series, as with other Stross series, The Laundry Files is getting grimmer by the volume, with the breezy narration barely offsetting a universe of chill-inducing horrors. Even having smart-aleck Bob back as the main narrator isn’t enough to make us forget that Bob is no longer Bob, that the series has moved far past paperclip jokes and that the narrative is describing the mid-phase of a Lovecraftian singularity putting everyone in existential danger.

    Even then, the book is a breeze to read — I managed it in less than a day, so invested was I in finding out what was going on. From the point when Bob survives an attempt to abduct and eliminate him on the streets of London, it’s a wild ride to the end. The characters that are assembled have already been developed to the point where the fun is in having them all interact. (Compared to the book that introduced her, I was surprisingly fond of bubbly elven sorceress Cassie this time around, for instance — it does help that we don’t spend too much time in her head. There’s a paradoxical effect here in that, by showing mid-to-high-level Laundry employees leaguing together, the agency does lose quite a bit of its mystique: there’s a feeling that there’s not a lot left to discover about the organization or its universe at this point, which makes sense considering that the action is moving at a faster pace that takes advantage of everything we know about The Laundry Files at this point.

    The effectiveness of the results is undeniable: The Delirium Brief is the best book of the series in a long while, because it gets back to the roots of the series and goes forward with the entire cast of characters. Compulsively readable, cleverly imagined and largely true to the series’ evolution (at the expense of the humour, alas), it’s a big irrevocable step forward and a reward for faithful series readers so far.

  • The Nightmare Stacks [The Laundry Files 7], Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2016, 400 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 978-0425281192

    Hello Laundry Files, it’s been a while.

    There’s some heavy-duty irony in how my review of The Apocalypse Codex, the previous book in The Laundry Files series, began with an appreciation of how it was my favourite ongoing fiction series, that I stuck by it even as my reading volume was going down across the board, and how I was lucky to have one more book in the series on-hand to read as quickly as possible.

    That was in 2016. Six years ago.

    Of course, I didn’t plan it this way. Stuff Happened. To borrow from the vernacular of the series itself, 2017–2018 was CASE NIGHTMARE BEIGE time — a culmination of personal catastrophes across many separate domains of my life and I didn’t get much recreational reading done at all during that time. Even the laborious reconstruction that followed did not include much fiction reading. Ironically, it took a global pandemic crisis to bring a bit of personal peace and contentment, and the intention to renew with past hobbies. I played a lot of videogames in 2020, and oversaturation was part of the plan so that I would renew with recreational reading (on paper!) in 2021. Carving out pre-bedtime reading ended up being easier than I thought, and beginning slowly (with scripts, comic books, biographies of classic Hollywood crushes) ended up being a winning strategy. But if my videogame re-immersion experience of last year is any indication, I can expect a fairly long first phase of catching up on series/authors/styles, and The Nightmare Stacks (long purchased, never read) was high on the list.

    I still think that The Laundry Files remains my current favourite ongoing series. As I’ve mentioned before, its blend of high-octane speculation, universe-wide scope, geeky sensitivities, niche humour and public sector thrills intersects with a surprising number of my own personal interests. I’ve bought and read most of Stross’ published output so far and I’ve never been even slightly disappointed by its entries… until now, that is.

    The sixth entry in the series, The Nightmare Stacks, does feel a lot like the previous two books in how it fully pivots the series in weirder and more diverse territory — unlike the opening tetralogy that kept stretching the series’ original novella’s trans-dimensional horror/humour ongoing narrative in a way that spoofed British Thriller writers, the next three books in the series pivoted to include elements of urban fantasy in the Laundry framework, not-so-coincidentally moving away from the first few books’ narrator with the intention of creating a looser framework that could accommodate many more kinds of stories. At the same time, the series also set up the ticking time bomb at the heart of the developing narrative: CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, or the unfolding and possibly unavoidable Lovecraftian extinction-level event that is clearly rushing up to meet the characters.

    But that gets put on hold during most of The Nightmare Stacks, which makes a book out of a semi-comic conceit: What if the Laundry was so focused on avoiding one kind of threat that it missed clues about another kind of threat? Freshly-minted vampire protagonist Alex is at the centre of the unfolding narrative this time around, as his assignment to prepare The Laundry for the coming apocalypse by finding new headquarters in Leeds gets him in contact with the advance scout for another trans-dimensional invasion force. But while the Elfin antagonists of this volume may feel like the C-team to the series’ main threats, they do have the advantage of surprise — by the end of the book, the long-awaited intrusion of occult threats finally makes the front page of British media with a mega-death body count.

    While much of the book does feel like a semi-interlude (which is patently untrue once you get to the next book in the series — but I’m anticipating my next review), it does offer Stross a chance to take a breath, play with new characters, have fun in a semi-romantic comedy narrative (!), slightly reconfigure his universe and ultimately set up the next few instalments on firmer ground.

    I did have a few problems getting into the book. It had been a long time, for one thing, and getting used again to the series’ very specific jargon did take a few pages and reference refreshers. I was also initially unsure about Alex as series protagonist, although that doesn’t last long: While the series’ initial protagonist Bob Howard aged out of his charming wide-eyed innocence a few books ago, Alex is still sufficiently low-level (but skilled at what he does) to be interesting, and meet challenges that can be appreciated at a more relatable level… such as meeting a cute girl that ends up being a trans-dimensional spy. On the other hand, I did have a constant difficulty staying interested in the segments written from The Other’s perspective — those were more successful once The Other got closer to humanity, but most of the time I was tempted to skip entire passages. I didn’t and only half-regretted it — which points at some weaknesses in the result.

    Consider that the book’s best and most enjoyable sequence is a family dinner gone severely awry when the expectations of the parents regarding their progeny are simultaneously and severely challenged: a big comedy of discomfort and half-truths laid bare by a four-ring circus of clashes set around a common dining table. Meanwhile, an aerial engagement between jet fighters and dragons later in the book feels a bit perfunctory. There’s a clash of styles and interest between the novel’s lower-level character drama and its higher-level war narrative that doesn’t quite gel. It feels as if Stross found himself ill-equipped in trying to humanize the big events in the final third, having to introduce many new minor characters in order to describe the events, but without the connection that we have with the recurring characters of the rest of the series. It’s interesting to read, but it’s not gripping or enjoyable like the book’s other passages. It’s also clear that this is meant to be the narrative of a defeat: In The Laundry’s universe, the good guys are (so far!) always fighting to preserve normalcy in the face of intrusion, and no matter if this intrusion is stopped before it got worse, it’s still a resounding loss and shift in the scenery. The Nightmare Stacks ends far too soon to get an idea of the repercussions of what just happened, but it’s clear that plenty of cats have clawed their way out of the bag, some of them are lion-sized and they’re all hungry.

    I also suspect that the book is sufficiently off-rack compared to previous instalments that I wasn’t feeling as much affection for the result. There’s a noticeable down-tick in the humour of the series’ tongue-in-cheek approach that’s not quite compensated by the result. The narrative here isn’t as strong on public service concerns (what with its protagonist being an unwilling civil service recruit), nor does it delve as much in the murky funhouse reflection of spy thriller narratives. Sure, one of the main characters is a one-woman spying agency, but it’s in service of a new and unfamiliar antagonist.

    All of this should explain my somewhat muted reaction to the result. Oh, The Nightmare Stacks does nothing to stop me from getting the next book in the series — I’m still eager to learn what happens next. What’s more, Stross is too canny a writer to keep his series in statis: things change, evolve, inevitably lead to nuclear Armageddon and readers should be prepared to keep up.

    More to the point, it’s not as if The Nightmare Stacks doesn’t have its share of good moments. The titular stacks are a collection of weapons accumulated by the British government to prepare for any kind of eventuality, both conventional and occult. I did like the taming of an alien invader forced to appreciate humanity when she takes over a bubbly drama student. Alex eventually grew on me as a protagonist, with his part in the book’s climax standing out as the best aspect of the book’s last third. We also get a glimpse at new facets of the Laundry universe, although the integration is clunkier than usual — an entirely new “DM” character is presented as if we already knew about him (Stross apparently meant to write a novella introducing him but never got around to it), although the closer look at “forecasting ops” is suitably mysterious and portentous. Stross remains an engaging, hip, compelling narrator (at least in those human-readable passages) and the book has its share of really good lines.

    Ultimately, The Nightmare Stacks does have the advantage of being an episode in a longer series — even a temporary side-step has to be evaluated in a bigger context and may mean something else in the long run. Without spoiling too much about my next review, I’m writing this one while I’m one day and a hundred pages in the next volume — and I can reassure everyone that The Delirium Brief gets the series on familiar tracks, and recontextualizes The Nightmare Stacks as a crucial precipitating factor in a far more unnerving narrative. I suspect that I’ll eventually come to regard this seventh volume as mild bump in the road that sets up far more interesting later instalments.

  • Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, Scott Eyman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2020, 576 pages, C$47.00 hc, ISBN 978-1501192111

    Whenever people find out I’m a big Classic Hollywood fan, one of the questions I often get is “Who’s your favourite actor?” Trying to explain that there’s a lot of them and picking one would be incredibly reductive takes too long, so I’ve gotten in the habit of answering, “Cary Grant.”  It’s not only true, but it’s also a pretty safe choice, as these things go: Unlike other actors who had more range or a deeper craving for dramatic depth, Grant usually played the same kind of likable character. Intensely charming to the point where calling him a paragon of charisma is underselling it, Grant’s on-screen image remains remarkably timeless. The epitome of Classic Hollywood, Grant was the kind of person for whom someone came up with the old saw, “men wanted to be him; women wanted to be with him.”

    That Cary Grant wasn’t born Cary Grant was not a secret. Any half-decent studio-approved profile of him during his working career usually mentioned that he was born Archibald “Archie” Leach in lower-class Bristol. What’s more, there are at least two explicit references to Leach’s “death” in Grant’s films (visual in Arsenic and Old Lace, spoken in His Girl Friday). The man who would become Cary Grant reinvented himself once he got to Hollywood — and (decades later) legally changed his name the day he became an American citizen. But as Scott Eyman demonstrates in the exemplary Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, the gulf between the man and his screen person was never wider than the one between Leach and Grant. You can certainly interpret his life in three acts as he became Grant in name, struggled to keep up with his screen persona, and finally managed to close the gap after retiring from acting.

    The facts of Grant’s life are easy enough to grasp from Wikipedia’s blandly descriptive article. Joining a musical hall troupe and travelling to America to escape a poor upbringing (and terrible family dynamics — his mother committed to an asylum by his father, who led the young Archie to believe she was dead), he arrived in Hollywood at the beginning of the sound era, where an apprenticeship from 1932 to 1936 led to an incredible string of successful performances in romantic comedies from 1937 to 1944. His stardom thus assured, Grant kept going through familiar motions for a few years until a hiatus in 1953. Called back to the big screen by Hitchcock after some globetrotting, his next few projects revived his career and gave him another run of great movies from 1955 to 1963. Unusually enough, Grant decided to retire in 1966—years before invalidity or box-office irrelevance and, incidentally, the year before Hollywood completely changed with the arrival of New Hollywood. His next twenty years were spent doting on his daughter and reinforcing his second career as a businessman, only infrequently acknowledging his past as a movie icon. Despite two nominations, Grand never won a competitive Oscar — he was awarded an honorary one in 1972. He died of a sudden cerebrovascular incident in 1986, in a small town where he was slated to attend an intimate Q&A event.

    But those facts barely scratch the complexity of the man. While audiences always expect a difference between actors and the character they play, the gulf between Leach and Grant was stark. Even before discussing Grant-the-character, Grant-the-actor was a deliberate creation of Leach-the-man: Taking bits and pieces of other people he admired upon his arrival in Hollywood, he built a refined, sophisticated persona that he then spent years trying to become. The difference could be seen through exceptional insecurity, lower-class reflexes at odds with his status as a superstar actor (such as an aversion to spending money) and a strong self-loathing of his profession. In later years, Grant wouldn’t spend much time associating himself with classic Hollywood, nor would he encourage his daughter to follow in his footsteps.

    Eylman delves deep into Grant’s life throughout the book. Already familiar with the Classic Hollywood era, he’s able to properly contextualize Grant’s films and career against a backdrop of studio contracts and an evolving industry. Nearly ever Grant film is described with entertaining production notes and box-office results, tracking the genesis of projects and their impact on his life and career. On a personal level, the biographer is able to follow Grant’s quirks and lifestyle (such as his never-finished Hollywood mansion, and his more easygoing life in Palm Springs). Grant was a man of substantial complexity, and A Brilliant Disguise manages to portray his contradictions with some finesse: he was at once incredibly cheap (to the point of nickel-and-diming guests) and incredibly generous, sending gifts and substantial amounts of money to friends and people in need. Much has been made of Grant’s sexuality over the years, and while Eyman finds plenty of evidence to suggest that Grant was variously bisexual at times during his life (including some late-life confessions that he had same-sex flings as a young man, but preferred heterosexual relationships the older he got), he’s on much more interesting ground in telling us that “Grant was on nobody’s team but his own.”  Five marriages are enough to be intriguing on their own.

    Still, the main psychodrama running throughout the narrative is one of dissociation and eventual reintegration between Leach and Grant. You may expect the biography to be over by the time Grant retires from acting and stops talking about Hollywood but there’s still a good hundred pages or so describing Grant as an older man, clearly more at peace with both halves of himself than he’d even been. He becomes relaxed, generous, just as charming but now with the knowledge that he had nothing further to prove. There’s a rather likable atmosphere in those later chapters, as Grant obsessively documents his daughter’s life, flies to business meetings around the world and occasionally acknowledges his film accomplishments. Grant’s late-life Q&A sessions would have been unthinkable earlier during his life when he was a master of the no-answer interviews revealing little about himself.

    Fans of Old Hollywood will find plenty to like here, whether it’s the clear backdrop of how Hollywood changed from 1930 to 1965, or the appearances by other Hollywood celebrities. Eyman is too good to indulge in unverified gossip — the anecdotes here are telling without being salacious. Still, I did not expect to read about Grant smashing Oscar Levant’s parked car with his own in a fit of jealous rage over the same woman. The book is intelligible to all, but most clearly aimed at those with some familiarity with Grant and his era of stardom. I found quite a few new revelations here—including the strong suggestion that Grant worked with British movie mogul Alexander Korda during WW2 in helping the British intelligence services keep tabs on Hollywood—Eyman uncovers enough details in Korda’s FBI file about his American intelligence operation and a curious sudden end to Grant’s attempts to serve the war effort to suggest that Grant eventually found covert employment—although proof remains elusive and possibly unattainable.

    As far as biographies go, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise meets the gold standard of the genre. Exceptionally well-researched yet compellingly written to give us a great glimpse at the man and his times, it’s a captivating portrait of Cary Grant and his evolution. It’s terrific reading, with the only hiccup being the use of unfamiliar expressions probably stemming from Leach’s working-class English background. It’s good enough that readers will feel as if they have a good working approximation of Grant in their heads by the time the book is over. While I’m not quite an authority on the subject, it does feel like a definitive biography — it sets a very, every high bar for any subsequent effort.

  • Virginia O’Brien: MGM’s Deadpan Diva, Robert Strom

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    BearManor Media, 2018, 304 pages, C$45.00 hc, ISBN 978-1629332208

    One of the most charming afflictions of digging into Hollywood history is getting crushes on long-dead actresses, their fleeting likenesses captured in fuzzy black-and-white video and scratchy monaural audio. It’s almost tradition to look up their filmography and immediately get an overview of their careers and deaths. They may be gone, but their performances live on.

    Such is the case with Virginia O’Brien (1919–2001), a very distinctive performer with a short career: she appeared (sometimes briefly) in less than twenty movies, most of them from 1940 to 1947 while she was under contract to MGM. I first encountered her during a broadcast of Ziegfeld Follies (1945), a revue film in which the plot takes a distant second place to a series of musical and comedy numbers. After an introduction featuring no less than Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and then Lucille Ball cracking a whip over chorus girls dressed as panthers (!), the first thing that struck me about the film was the next performance: An unexpectedly hilarious song in which a cute brunette with a bored air but wickedly funny gestures sang about “Bring on Those Wonderful Men” from atop an obviously fake horse. I immediately watched the number again, because I wasn’t prepared for it the first time.

    That, in a nutshell, was Virginia O’Brien: a beautiful woman with a gift for song and comedy who could instantly become the highlight of any film with a two-minute performance. As I deliberately tracked down her screen appearances, the pattern would repeat itself. She would appear in the middle of a film, slay the audience with a deadpan rendition of a comic song, and leave us wondering why the rest of the film couldn’t be as good as she was. Most of her movie credits are one-scene appearances, sometimes two scenes if the producers wanted a little bit more fizz. More rarely, she had more substantial roles: She played second fiddle to Eleanor Powell in Ship Ahoy, to Lucille Ball in Du Barry was a Lady and to Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls — that last being the best-known of the films she played in. Her only starring credit is Merton of the Movies, in which she (ably) plays the romantic lead to frequent co-star Red Skelton, doesn’t sing but gets a great romantic comedy scene in teaching him thirty-seven kinds of kisses. O’Brien’s voice and style were so distinctive that it happened more than once that I’d perk up and pay attention when movies playing in the background featured her. (For more appreciations, have a look at my “Virginia O’Brien” tag.)

    That, if you only paid attention to the movies capturing her performances, would be all you’d know about Virginia O’Brien. Beautiful face, tall-and-slim figure, lovely brunette curly hair, great comic instincts and a decent voice made even more remarkable by her deadpan style. But “deadpan” undersells the effectiveness of her comic style: the bored voice is enlivened by lively interjections, quick facial expressions (eyebrows raised, eyes rolling, grimaces) satirizing the song and, in her best performances such as Du Barry Was a Lady’s “Salome” or Two Girls and a Sailor’s “Take it Easy,” hand gestures and full-body comedy to an extent that you’re missing more than half the fun if you’re only listening. Most of her work is in bite-sized song performances ideally suited to a YouTube binge, but quickly going through her filmography in that way does remove the element of contrast from her performances — she was remarkable because she did things very differently from other featured players of the time.

    It’s wonderful to realize that thanks to the Internet and film institutions such as Turner Classic Movies, people can still appreciate someone born a hundred years earlier, especially one who never achieved superstardom. There is no fan club for O’Brien, but there are plenty of fan pages. If you wanted more, your options were limited until 2017, when Robert Strom’s full-length authorized biography Virginia O’Brien: MGM’s Deadpan Diva became available for purchase. I couldn’t help myself — I had to learn more than the cursory biographies available online and so got myself a hardcover version of the book.

    As a piece of work celebrating O’Brien, Strom’s book has the essentials: A birth-to-death narrative, pages of sources, excerpts from contemporary articles, a stunning number of pictures, as well as recollections from her daughter and late-life acquaintances. If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of O’Brien’s life, you have plenty of material here.

    Unfortunately, you’re going to have to work and suffer for it because MGM’s Deadpan Diva is a frustrating biography. The issues are numerous, and they can be found at all levels, from the words to the structure.

    BearManor is a small publisher with a large catalogue, but based on this book I’m not sure that they have the resources to properly do justice to what they publish. Typos, errant spacing and typography errors abound. One of them is even on the back cover, failing to distinguish between two titles from the same author; some of them interrupt the flow of reading (such as when a piece of narrative is formatted as a quote on page 116); and there’s one oddly misplaced more on page 188 that makes me suspect that the editor’s notes were not completely removed from the printed manuscript. Such errors fall squarely in the realm of the publisher more than the author, but they don’t inspire confidence in the rest of the work.

    But the problems get worse when you get to the sentence-by-sentence writing of the book, which is straightforward at best, irritating at worst and clumsy most of the time. Ambiguous syntax abounds, failing to distinguish between O’Brien and other people. Many sentences have to be re-read to be understood. Crucial connective passages are missing, making the narrative feel like sentences simply strung together. The narrative flow is frequently absent, and Strom can’t always tell a story effectively due to a lack of structure in his paragraphs. Did anyone even try to improve the manuscript? Such editing errors are a disservice to the author: Awkward sentences without context make Strom sound dumber than he is (Such as the bit on page 225 where he praises Wikipedia at the expense of IMDB’s completeness… what?)

    Nearly every page has an issue. Some of them are obscure: the one French quote in the notes is garbled beyond full understanding, which probably won’t bother most of the book’s audience. But some of them are more spectacular than others, such as the dumb mistakes of repeating the same paragraph almost verbatim on successive pages (see “…articles began to appear about Virginia’s return to movies…” on pages 222 and 223). It’s enough to make anyone wonder if BearManor simply reprinted the first draft sent by the author. Any good editor would have done something to improve the result — and if one did, I shudder at the thought of what the initial draft looked like.

    But all of this pales in comparison to the biography’s more substantive failings. While I believe the Strom has assembled almost everything ever published or broadcast about O’Brien (most likely through having access to her personal archives), he hasn’t synthesized or analyzed much. Much of MGM’s Deadpan Diva reads like undigested press clippings, going from one article summary to another in an attempt to tell a life through media echoes of public appearances. The trivialities and repetitions are exasperating, especially in tangents that contribute nearly nothing to O’Brien’s biography nor the context in which she worked. Strom too infrequently cares to comment on the material he collects, leaving readers to wonder what’s important, what’s false and what’s normal.

    It doesn’t help that the chronology of the book seems focused on media appearances rather than O’Brien’s life. Some fundamental questions are addressed late in the book, as O’Brien reflects on her past career in interviews and Strom summarizes her recollections — but the best place for that information would have been earlier in the narrative, informing our understanding of O’Brien’s state of mind in the thick of her brush with stardom. As it is, Strom has produced a biography that never gets in O’Brien’s head and seems content to look at it from the outside, a hands-off approach that remains intensely frustrating throughout.

    Biographies don’t have to be like that. By happenstance, I ended up reading Scott Eyman’s superb Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise in parallel with Virginia O’Brien: MGM’s Deadpan Diva, alternating chapters from both books and… well, Eyman isn’t known as one of the best biographers of classic Hollywood for no reason. Eyman succeeds everywhere Strom falters: A Brilliant Disguise is a joy to read, dramatizes Grant’s life from the available documentation, does not spare its subject from criticism and actually gets into a very complicated man’s head in a way that answers troublesome questions. Coming back to MGM’s Deadpan Diva after that felt like having to do homework, trying to assemble a coherent picture of O’Brien from the breadcrumbs collected by Strom.

    It doesn’t help that Strom appears to be more of an admirer than an honest biographer. MGM’s Deadpan Diva is a hagiography. He doesn’t want to question his subject. He doesn’t even seem interested in presenting a full picture. One of the rare moments where his text becomes animated is in criticizing a negative but provocative review of O’Brien’s tribute show that more even-handed biographers may have used to explore her late career. Strom refuses to explore O’Brien’s life beyond lavish praise at everything she did and so I’m left at the end of his book with more questions than at the beginning. Even from the outline of her life, I want to ask — why the three marriages? How did she feel when at the mercy of the studio? What was it to be on set in MGM’s legendary backlot? Did she resent Judy Garland’s breakdown affecting the end of her MGM contract? (O’Brien may have had a very different career if Garland’s personal issues hadn’t delayed the filming The Harvey Girls beyond the date at which O’Brien’s risky first pregnancy required cutting down her role.)  Was her post-1947 life really entirely dedicated to recapturing her glory days at MGM, or is this just the impression left from Strom’s media-centric research? How did she feel after the end of her Hollywood experience, balancing family life with memories of quasi-stardom? How was Virginia O’Brien away from the stage? Strom barely answers, sometimes with a mere unquestioned line or two. Even later-life highlights, such as being designated honorary mayor of Wrightwood, CA, are barely covered. So many questions, not all of them comfortable.

    I can understand the reason behind some of these choices. 1940s Hollywood was a long time ago from an oral history perspective. Unlike other Hollywood superstars, O’Brien did not leave much in terms of interviews, writings, a lengthy body of work or critical commentary about her. You can’t just ring up Red Skelton and ask what he thought of her off-camera. The official early record is tainted by the work of MGM publicists, and later record filtered through people who wanted to be nice to her. Even being able to interview her daughter and a few other people who knew her in the 1980s (a point at which Strom’s portrait finally becomes less media-centric) is not like having access to contemporary recollections from third parties or private diaries —although I gather from the acknowledgements that Strom had access to O’Brien’s personal memorabilia and worked closely with her daughter. Strom took on a tough assignment, and at times I felt that getting rid of the book’s trivial minutia would probably not leave a viable work to publish.

    But there are ways around some of that, and you can see in the book a few ways in which it could have been improved. A structure that doesn’t clumsily begin with a dull exposition of what happened in the world in 1919 would have helped — considering that Strom repeats a few versions of O’Brien’s origin story (she discovered her gift for comedy when she was stage-struck in front of an audience, started singing with a stone-cold lack of facial expression, and got such a great reaction that she made that her shtick.), all of this could have been distilled in an opening chapter dramatizing her Big Moment.

    Strom also largely fails at the art of providing context. There’s a reason why “The Life and Times of X” have become such a cliché biography subtitle: understanding a person is only possible in understanding what was normal and what was not about them and their environment. There was an ideal opportunity to explore the life of a minor studio contract player through O’Brien. Glimpses of this appear in MGM’s Deadpan Diva, as Strom assembles the publicity material required of the studio’s marketing machine and hints at what was expected from those under contract. But there’s very little context. Even in introducing the movies in which O’Brien plays, Strom barely provides any descriptions of those films that would make it easier to understand O’Brien’s place in Hollywood. In fact, by highlighting O’Brien at the expense of the system of which she was a part, Strom gives a misleading impression that does a disservice to her accomplishments. (Again: the perils of a fannish biography.) I read more intriguing takes on O’Brien from quick blog posts commenting her performances without the depth of media clippings and friendly recollections that Strom assembled. What a missed opportunity — Superstar biographies are common, but this was a chance to do something more interesting about a regular player and, in doing so, explore the studio system from a different perspective.

    After so many paragraphs eviscerating the failings of MGM’s Deadpan Diva, you could be forgiven for thinking that I hate it… but I don’t. Oh, I was frequently annoyed, frustrated and even exasperated throughout the entire book, but I still think that its very existence is wonderful. I like that, even with its numerous problems, there’s an entire book dedicated to a minor MGM star born more than a hundred years ago.

    I certainly have issues with the way it’s presented, but I actually learned quite a bit from MGM’s Deadpan Diva: One particularity that short profiles of O’Brien undersell is how she was a rare Los Angelino to make it to the movies: She didn’t come to Hollywood from other areas of the United States seeking fame and fortune, but grew up around the city’s best-known industry and arguably fell into it by happenstance. Her father was a well-known policeman, her aunt (momentarily) married into the movie business and she was discovered by MGM because she was playing at a theatrical venue in town. Even left to my own conclusions, the repetitious detailing of O’Brien’s performances for the troops throughout World War II and radio appearances adds an intriguing dimension as something you can’t really know from the movies themselves. It’s amazing that we get a good chunk of the book dedicated to what happened to her after the cameras stopped rolling for the big screen, as she goes on to capitalize on her past fame by performing in small cabaret venues and for tribute shows with other aging celebrities. As someone with a deepening understanding of classic Hollywood history, I got quite a thrill learning that she was friends with Groucho Marx, met fellow-deadpanner Buster Keaton at least once (the book showcases a photo of him sitting on her) and was photographed next to other favourite MGM players such as Ann Miller and Cyd Charisse in their later years. Speaking of which — the book probably has the ultimate collection of Virginia O’Brien pictures ever assembled.

    In other words, I really enjoyed MGM’s Deadpan Diva even despite its hair-pulling problems. I’m actually proud to own the book — There probably aren’t that many printed copies out there, and the subject matter is so specific that the book can become a conversation piece by itself. I’d love to get the book autographed if I could. I may have a lengthy list of things that I wish Strom had done better, but the effort required to get all of that information must have been substantial, and I’m indescribably glad that someone did it. The flip-side of that is that you have to be a Virginia O’Brien fan before cracking open the book — Unlike other biographies, MGM’s Deadpan Diva presumes that you already love her and doesn’t make much of an effort to explain why she warrants your attention. It’s a biography for fans with the huge proviso that this entails, but if you’re hungering for more about O’Brien, steel yourself for bad writing and get the book anyway: it has everything that’s possible to dig up about her, even if there’s still quite a bit of assembly required.

  • The Andromeda Evolution, Daniel H. Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    2019, Harper, C$24.99, 366 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-295666-8

    Freakishly observant readers of this web site have probably noticed something fundamental: I’m no longer the book-reviewing powerhouse that I once was. For decades, I kept up an eight-book-review-a-month pace – but that number took a dive off a cliff once I was no longer a bachelor, stopped riding the bus for my commute and shifted my primary area of interest to movies rather than books.  This is likely going to be my only book review for 2019.  I’m not happy about it, but getting back to my previous stream of book reviews will have to wait a bit longer. if nothing else, this shift has informed me on the lifestyle of the smart people who don’t read: it turns out that you have to work at integrating literature in your life, and that takes both time and specific circumstances. So easy to spend hours obsessing about politics through social media when a far more productive use of time would be to read meaningless genre entertainment.

    So, anyway: While I don’t read as much as I did, or buy as many books as I did, a recent Costco expedition had me contemplating a curious novel: The Andromeda Evolution, written by Daniel H. Wilson — a sequel to the well-regarded Michael Crichton novel The Andromeda Strain.

    I did think twice about picking it up.  On the one hand: a trade paperback techno-thriller, available for cheap at Costco?  I do have a fondness for The Andromeda Strain, which I re-read not too long ago after watching the movie adaptation.  On the other hand: this kind of literary necrophilia must stop.  I don’t really want to encourage the kind of publishing behavior in which a dead author is propped up as a marketing term so that another writer can write sequels rather than come up with something more original. Yes, I know, even techno-thriller writers must pay the bills.  On the other, other hand: If I’m already thinking that hard about a novel before even reading it, chances are good that it’s going to make great material for a review.  Of course, I bought it.

    The existence of The Andromeda Evolution is not an accident – not when it’s released on the fiftieth anniversary of The Andromeda Strain, not when it depends on the agreement of the Crichton Sun literary trust (the novel is copyrighted to Crichton Sun, suggesting straight-up work-for-hire), not when there’s a Hollywood Reporter article talking about how Crichton Sun looked for a writer for the project.  Not when the last acknowledgements in the book are not from Wilson, but Crichton’s widow.  Considering how deep we’re into posthumous exploitation, the question becomes: How skilled would Wilson have to be to deliver a novel that would be worth a read as more than a commercial object?

    It turns out that there’s something really interesting, at least in concept, in the idea of turning in a fifty-year-removed sequel to a techno-thriller.  As The Andromeda Evolution gets underway, it goes have the luxury of blending the events of its predecessor into actual ever-more-distant history. From the opening moments of the book, as automated systems pick up traces of something of high interest to the US government, the incidents of The Andromeda Strain become deep history informing some modern actions.  (There’s even quite a bit of irony in how some character don’t quite know, or remember, why the automated detection systems were put in place.)

    The meta-fictional games don’t quite stop there, albeit with mixed result – it’s somewhat off-putting to see weak Crichton quotes being used as epigraphs for the novel’s sections.  What’s more interesting for anyone with fresh memories of the original novel is seeing how much Wilson has tried to ape Crichton’s supremely authoritative style: The novel is written as an official “meticulous reconstruction of a five-day scientific crisis that culminated in the near extinction of our species.” [P.xi] and wrapped in ominous warnings, formatted pseudo-documents, plans, even an evidence “photo” and a hilariously misleading list of end references that includes the original novel, its movie adaptation, reviews and articles about Crichton alongside scientific articles and papers.

    Alas, Wilson isn’t as skilled a bullshitter techno-fabulist as Crichton – moments such as the original’s utterly convincing digression about the fictional Kalocin drug, or the “odd-man hypothesis” are never matched here.  But Wilson does give it a good attempt and mostly manages the necessary suspension of disbelief required to get readers invested in the early pages of the novel. As the US government resurrects old contingency plans to deal with a fatal extraterrestrial threat, we shift from historical fact blended with Crichton mythology to more traditional genre thriller tropes. The prologue ends with the delicious and frankly irresistible “Conservative estimates from the DC-based Nova America think tank conclude that Stern’s hunch likely saved three to four billion lives” [P.33].

    After that, we’re off to the races, albeit more circuitously than you’d expect.  Much of the action doesn’t necessarily go back to the high-tech antiseptic atmosphere of the original book – rather than hunkering in a bunker, the crew of specialists off to save the world head to the Amazonian jungle, echoing more the feeling of Congo than The Andromeda Strain. But at the same time, we go in orbit to spend time with another character in the International Space Station.  The two plotlines eventually intersect in a somewhat convoluted fashion.  In dealing with the inheritance of the original novel, Wilson pushes Crichton’s concept even further, positing conscious design and goals for the Andromeda strain that take it up a notch in time for the last third of the novel…. While reaching deep into the details of the first book for an essential character of the second.

    Despite some of my skepticism, it works more often than not: it’s a page-turner, and it uses the first novel in interesting way compared to vast majority of posthumous sequels – something very much helped by the acknowledged fifty-year gulf between both novels.  But if my admiration is substantial, I’m not quite as enthusiastic about the fictional nuts-and-bolts of the book.  The pacing has some severe issues, especially as the team of characters heads into the jungle and the novel feels as if it’s spinning its wheels until it gets to the good stuff.  Some of the story’s humanism seem laid on a bit too thickly (perhaps inevitable considering the balance required to make the novel’s techno-fetishism more palatable) and while such things usually pass me unnoticed, I couldn’t help but feel that one antagonist’s motivations curdle straight into uncomfortable ableism.  A more serious issue is that while the re-use of Crichton elements is interesting, it does prevent The Andromeda Evolution from truly coming into its own.  You can also certainly argue that Wilson demonstrates the perils of overreaching —while the original was a masterclass of hermetic claustrophobia, this sequel goes much wider, much wilder and doesn’t quite have a tight focus.

    As a reviewer looking to flex critical muscles once again, I do have some lingering appreciation for the ways The Andromeda Evolution is interesting – and am somewhat more muted on its effectiveness as a novel. But I enjoyed reading it, and sometimes that’s all you need.

    Especially if this is going to be the only book I’ll review this year.

  • The Big Picture, Ben Fritz

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Eamon Dolan, 2018, 304 pages, $ 23.00US, ISBN 978-0-544-78976-0 2018-04-15

    From 2001 to 2018, I was lucky enough to be a professional movie columnist for two French-Canadian magazines. My mandate was genre-focused, but as the years went by my column increasingly used simple movie reviewing as a launchpad to broader considerations about the evolution of the movie industry. In late 2016, to celebrate fifteen years of quarterly columns, I decided to ditch reviews for one column and spend 5,000 words taking a data-driven look at the overall state of movies as of late 2016, in-between online distribution, the evolution of blockbusters toward serials and the sheer amazing number of movies produced every year. If you’re curious and can read French (or feed the URL to the surprisingly competent Google Translate), you can read the column in its crime/thriller focus at Alibis, or its SF/fantasy variant at Solaris.

    I offer the preceding paragraph not as puffery (after all, budget cuts being what they are, both of these columns have since been shut down and I am now that most pitiable of creatures; an unemployed movie reviewer) but as feeble credentials in considering Ben Fritz’s The Big Picture, which takes a step back from box-office grosses to take a look at the state of the cinematic art, or rather how the industry is remaking itself in the image of what moviegoers are now willing to pay for.

    Fritz and I may have been looking at the same topic (and we did reach some similar conclusion), but I’m just a schmuck with Internet access, whereas he’s a movie financial correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, with impeccable industry sources and a privileged perch overseeing every Hollywood twitch. He was also willing to delve deep in the leaked emails from Sony, using those as a surprisingly effective way to give life to his overall thesis.

    His book, in short, argues that Hollywood (i.e.; the “big six” studios that release the big-budget movies that dominate the global box office: Disney, Fox, Sony, Warner, Universal and Paramount) has been seduced by the bigger-is-better mentality. It now refuses to directly produce movies that are not assured hits (as much as those can be predicted) and is constantly doubling down on the examples set by previous box-office records. If Hollywood releases mid-budget movies not tied to existing universes, it’s usually because they bought distribution rights from the picture’s true owners—they will not, by themselves, finance a wholly original new creation. (The high-profile exceptions, such as Dunkirk, rather prove the rule—Warner Brothers has an ongoing relationship with screenwriter/director Christopher Nolan largely based on his success adapting the Batman franchise to the big screen.)

    The exemplar that Fritz uses in demonstrating his thesis is Disney. Earlier than anyone else in town, Disney realized that not taking creative risks meant not taking financial risks. Acquiring everything popular under the sun (such as Lucasfilm, Marvel and Pixar) was only a part of a strategy that also involved strip-mining its own back catalogue for live-action adaptations of animated movies, and hopefully making sequels to those movies as well. The counterpart of Disney’s acquire-and-regurgitate strategy was Sony (formerly Columbia)’s steadfast support for middle-budgeted movies developed in-house, under the watch of influential producer Amy Pascal. It worked until it didn’t, and as Fritz details (largely through the emails leaked from Sony’s own system), it only took a bad run of movies for Sony’s corporate investors to demand change, and for Sony to follow the leaders in financing only sure returns on investment. In Hollywood, nobody is chasing after mere millions dollars in profits—anything less than billions is a career-ending disappointment.

    Much of it has to do with the gatekeepers not necessarily liking their own products—whereas, at a time, legendary figures in Hollywood studios loved movies as much as they did business, the new corporate structures values management prowess first—artistic interest is entirely optional. As a result, not only has Hollywood completely abandoned the idea of making art for art’s sake (even for definitions of art that limit themselves to “tell a good story”), but the traditional one-of-the-money-one-for-the-art barter system is also disappearing.

    This has a number of visible consequences on the movies that are offered to audiences. Never mind the sequels, the spinoffs, or the reboots—once franchising rules the game and movies merely become another element in a multi-pronged multimedia strategy, it’s clear that whatever makes movies special is also negotiable. Forget about definitive shocking endings when there is always the possibility of another episode a few years later. (See: Avengers: Infinity War) Forget about directors taking control of the medium when they are merely hired to execute a studio strategy with the minimal amount of fuss. (See: Ron Howard and the Solo debacle.)  That also explains why so many young directors fresh out of an independent low-budget film are hired for massive tent-pole pictures: studios are hiring people they can boss around. (See: Josh Trank and the Fantastic Four trainwreck.)

    If there is a glimmer of hope in this business, goes on to explain Fritz, it’s that at a time when studios have abandoned cinema as they’ve perfected it, others are picking up the pieces. Digital filmmaking and post-production has lowered the cost and obstacles to make a professional film. Now, digital distribution of movies is also changing the landscape: Independent producers can shoot a film modestly, and release it widely to mainstream audiences on streaming platforms. Many of the Oscar-nominated movies of the past few years (which we’ll use loosely as a yardstick for artistic achievements, cynical quips be damned) have benefited from such arrangements. Additionally, distributors like A24 are doing well picking out good movies on the festival circuit, streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon are bidding high to distribute trickier projects, while social media discussions are changing the traditional marketing circuit.

    Which is saying that, as much as the current situation is terrible compared to the past (and about to get worse as the number of major Hollywood studios is expected to get smaller—Disney is purchasing Fox, and Paramount is perennially on the list of acquisition targets.), it’s not quite as bad as we think. It remains to be seen how long the current model is sustainable—there’s been a few signs of franchise fatigue recently, and it wouldn’t take much more than a handful of box-office bombs to change things forever, à la Musicals crash of the 1960s.

    It’s also an open question (muses this former reviewer) as to whether the recent shift toward massive global blockbusters has replaced cinema as we know it, or is merely a super-category imposed on top of the existing ecosystem. Movie theatres have evolved to take on the blockbusters, but in sheer number of movies produced every year and the general quality of the best of them, we’re still seeing an active art form. (Now that TV series are picking up movie storytelling and adapting it to a much longer running time, it’s also arguably allowing movies to focus on the core strengths of the medium without trying to stretch things over too long a running time.)  Hollywood decoupling itself from movies may be the best thing to happen to the art form.

    As we wait to see how things will shake out, I can’t recommend The Big Picture enough as an intelligible guide to a messy period for movies. Fritz knows his topic, writes clearly and can back up his thesis with telling examples. The book wasn’t just a pleasure to read—it’s also a resolutely modern book, in the best sense of the term, in how it’s willing to let go of the past in order to better talk about the present and the future of movies. I found it invigorating, and I suspect it’s going to become a reference text to anyone who’s trying to understand the way Hollywood is transforming itself at this point in time. I’ve been recommending it left and right, and I’m glad to include it on my shelf of essential books about Hollywood.

  • Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Henry Holt and Co., 2018, 336 pages, C$39.00 hc, ISBN 978-1-250-15806-2

    Just so that we’re clear on where this review is coming from: I’m not an American, and I’ve never been aboard the Donald Trump train. Like many others, I considered him a joke candidate until he wasn’t, and while I was momentarily intrigued by the idea of an outsider president able to set his own policy agenda outside establishment politics, a pair of articles read in early 2016 definitely made me a Never-Trumper: A transcript of Donald Trump’s meeting with The Washington Post editorial board that portrayed a candidate with serious cognitive problems, and an article from The Atlantic in 2011 describing how Trump personally wrote insulting notes to journalists reporting on him, showing a candidate with even more serious temperamental issues. I’m not claiming to any special deductive power here—what I saw was what everyone saw, and once you are outside the United States’ partisan borders as I am, my opinion is widely, almost universally shared.

    You can imagine that I didn’t sleep much on Election Night.

    The rest, as we now approach the first-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, is slowly sliding into history. It has been an eventful twelve months—even political junkies such as myself regularly risk overdoses when it comes to the carnival of political stories. Trump’s administration has been a rolling dumpster fire of incompetence, meanness and absurdity. While Americans seem to be stuck in a tribal epistemology debate, the rest of the world looks on worryingly and occasionally sends care packages to the remaining sane Americans—Are you OK? We’ll be there for you once this is all over. If we survive.

    Of course, the one-year anniversary of any new administration also sounds the starting gun of a second wave of reporting. Beyond the daily headlines and slightly longer analyses, a full year allows writers to take in the first few months of an administration and write longer pieces taking it all in. News reports and incidents accumulate, becoming data, patterns of behaviour and knowledge. While there have been a few relevant books about the campaign already published (Clinton’s What Happened is on shelves, along with the pro-Trump The Devil’s Bargain about Steve Bannon, and Corey Lewandowski’s Let Trump Be Trump), Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is the first blockbuster book giving readers insider access to the Trump White House’s first two hundred days.

    During that time, Wolff tells us, he basically sat in White House hallways, interviewed various people, listened to random conversations and was able to piece together a coherent picture of the administration. Amazingly enough, Wolff never signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement and was able to ask questions in a way that made people confide in him. The Trump administration thought he was one of theirs, but his conclusions aren’t friendly.

    Consider that most of Fire and Fury’s first chapter consists in presenting a portrait of Donald Trump as a dangerously unintelligent person. Though numerous examples and third-party recollections, we are shown an egomaniac who expected to lose the presidential election, someone uninterested in reading, analysis or decision-making. The essential Trump equals Stupidity equation is hammered over and over again, leaving us to wonder if Wolff has blown his most salient conclusion too early.

    But as it turns out, Trump equals Stupidity is a foundational aspect of the narrative that Wolff builds throughout the book. It is the necessary element to understand the dark comedy of Fire and Fury. The intellectual void at the top of the Trump administration explains why, in its first six months, three warring factions operated within the White House: The establishment Republicans (rep: Reince Preibus), the far-right populists (rep: Steve Bannon) and the president’s own family (rep: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner). Trump being a weak president unable to lead, all factions saw the potential for their viewpoint to prevail, explaining much of 2017’s turmoil.

    In any other administration, Wolff’s book would have been an unprecedented tell-all, vulnerable to basic incredulity—who would believe such a thing? But in Trump’s administration, the warring factions inside the White House leaked so much information throughout their tenure that much of the story has already been told and can readily be believed through corroboration. The leakiest administration in history has already had nearly all of its actions and inner processes extensively documented in public media. In this light, Wolff’s book becomes an exercise in detail and narrative—it provides additional information about actions already publicly described (such as going into further detail as to how Ivanka convinced her dad to send missiles on a Syrian airbase, by showing emotionally poignant pictures of dead children) and wraps up those news reports into something of an overarching theory about the administration.

    The story, as often repeated, is this: Trump is ill-equipped to be the President of the United States. He has neither the knowledge, the temperament nor the abilities to be commander in chief. This void is filled by people around him (few of them competent, because the competent ones know better than to dive in this cesspool), but since there are various factions all aiming for superiority, the results we get are inconsistent, and frequently sabotaged by Trump himself. Wolff tells, time and again, how everyone surrounding Trump has lost their illusions about him. They know him to be inept, and it’s only a matter of time before he turns on them. Those who stay do so because they’re convinced they can use his weakness as a way to further their own ambitions, or because they fear that even worse things would happen if they left.

    The book’s main narrative effectively ends in August 2017, days after the infamous press conference in which Trump refused to condemn neo-Nazi groups in the wake of the tragic Charlottesville events. (I remember that day—we were driving home after a long family trip, and my wife was reading the highlights of the press conference as they came in on her cell phone, while I was shaking my head in redundant disbelief.)  An October 2017 epilogue describes Steve Bannon’s future plans after leaving the White House, suggesting that Trump is merely a component of a larger movement.

    Ironically, the one person who does come out of the book more positively than others is Bannon himself. He was obviously a primary source for Wolff (thanks to the copious amount of Bannon’s inner monologue, but also descriptions of how voluble he can be) and it shows… Bannon’s agenda may be repulsive to most, but the man himself is shown to be more intelligent than most of the other people in the White House, his policy-making efforts sincerer than others, and his warnings going unheeded in the wake of catastrophic PR moves by the administration. Conversely, it goes without saying that the biggest loser of Wolff’s book is Trump himself—an empty shell where a leader should be, a self-destructive fool frequently losing control of himself. (“Dyslexic” and “illiterate” are only a few of the words used to describe him.) Still, those rankings are relative: Nearly everyone in the book is portrayed as being in over their heads, holding on until the pressure is intolerable. But once you accept the Trump equals Stupidity equation, it becomes difficult to be sympathetic to anyone willing to cover up for an unsuitable president.

    The reaction to Fire and Fury in the week-and-a-half since its first excerpts leaked has been as spectacular as it’s been predictable: The national conversation has seriously looked at nigh-unthinkable topics such as “Is the president mentally fit for duty?” prompting the new Trump-issued catchphrase “stable genius.”  The various factions of the Trump White House have started firing denials and accusations about what other factions have said, further reinforcing the book’s thesis. (And as I write this review, the BREAKING NEWS is that Bannon is out of Breitbart, largely due to Fire and Fury. The Trump news never stops, don’t they?)  Wolff has become a minor newsmaker, with post-publication interviews dropping further nuggets of provocation along the way, such as a possible affair in the White House. Clearly, there was an untapped hunger for a Trump-weary nation to discuss these things and the book was a catalyst for the conversation.

    And while it felt really good to read a book that tells it as candidly as possible, I’m not too fond of some aspects of Fire and Fury. Wolff spent a lot of time embedded with the Trump team and some of it has stained him. He sets up, somewhat disingenuously, an overarching polarized conflict between Trump and the media, minimizing that much of the revulsion against Trump and his systematic undermining of institutions goes far beyond the media to the American people at large who, by a three-million-vote margin, collectively preferred Hillary Clinton. There’s no need to portray the media as an antagonist. But then again, Wolff is a New York media creature, and he’s got plenty of baggage about it. In the middle of Fire and Fury, there is a lengthy digression about the New York Observer magazine that Jared Kushner bought, and it feels like score-settling coming out of nowhere. In other spots, the book feels as if it has been rushed through editing, with cumbersome sentence structures that could have used another round of polish.

    But does it matter? Ultimately, I expect that Fire and Fury’s legacy will be dictated by later events. There are roughly seven ways the Trump presidency can end (three of them not advisable to mention unless I want to end up on a list of suspicious foreign nationals) and the conclusion of his presidency will either invalidate or reinforce what Wolff has seen from his perch in the White House.

    And yet, as I proofread this review for publication a few weeks later, I’m struck at how the book both caused and explained Steve Bannon’s fall from grace even from his once-unassailable position in the conservative news media. Destructive agenda aside, Bannon is too smart for his own good … leading him to candid comments and a sentiment that he was essential to his cause. Alas (?), it turns out that he underestimated how much of a tool he was for Trump worshippers. I’m also struck at how much of a good mental model Wolff offered in Fire and Fury to understand how the Trump White House works—and how, as droves of people are quitting or being fired, Trump remains at the middle of the storm, empty, weak and impulsive. We can already tell it won’t end well.

  • Ultimate Lego Star Wars, Andrew Becraft and Chris Malloy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dorling Kindersley (DK), 2017, 320 pages, C$52.00 hc, ISBN 978-1-465-45558-1

    If you’re a fan of all things Lego, you already know that The Lego Group and Dorling Kindersley (DK) has enjoyed since 2008 a mutually beneficial relationship—all “official” Lego books of the coffee-table variety (oversized hardcover format, abundantly illustrated) have been published by DK for the past decade. If you’re putting together a solid Lego book collection, you know where to start: The Lego Book (2012) for starters, followed by LEGO Minifigure Year by Year: A Visual History (2013) and Great LEGO Sets: A Visual History (2015) are all great picks. There are also less essential choices for specific audiences: The Character Encyclopedia for Lego’s various worlds (Friends, CMF, Ninjago) are great for aficionados. The Build-your-own adventures and Ideas books are fine for avid builders.

    DK published two new Lego books in late 2017: LEGO Absolutely Everything You Need to Know and Ultimate Lego Star Wars. They are not in the same category. Absolutely Everything You Need to Know ranks as a good optional choice for Lego fans of all ages: It’s a 300-page accumulation of trivial Lego facts, loosely arranged in themes and sub-topics to cover two pages at a time. It’s not terribly deep (it’s in the nature of short trivia to lead to more questions) and the celebrated DK design aesthetics often work against itself in such a format (short factoids are not always illustrated, leading to frustration when there’s a non-illustrated reference) but it’s pleasant to read and it looks really good on a coffee table. It’s also precisely dated current as of July-August 2017, no more no less (the June 2017 release of the Ideas Apollo set is shown, but not the September 2017 Ideas Fishing Shack set or second iteration of the UCS Millennium Falcon set.)

    Ultimate Lego Star Wars is something else. Aiming to be nothing less than a complete encyclopedia of all Lego Star Wars, it’s a lavishly produced presentation of every single Star Wars Lego sets and character since the line’s introduction in 1999. Over the years, this amounts to more than 500 sets and roughly 900 minifigurines. The book is broadly organized in three big sections (Characters, Settings, Spaceships), that are then subdivided in more specialized subsections. Need to know about the dozen different versions of the Millennium Falcon, the multiple variants of the Darth Vader minifigurine or the various sets representing Tattoine? Ultimate Lego Star Wars has you covered.

    Great photography ensures that we get a good look at every set or minifigurine, something that becomes interesting in its own right when it showcases the various sets all presenting the same subject. Lego design has progressed significantly since 1999 (new pieces, new methods, new colours), and it’s instructive to see how the sets become more detailed as the years go by. Striking examples include the Millennium Falcon, the Y-wing fighter and the various versions of the X-Wing. Since advent calendar microbuilds are part of the inventory, the book also becomes a guide for Lego builders to replicate their favourite Star Wars creations using pieces they may already have. A few pages on Lego set and character design are included, adding even more interest to the entire package.

    With such a gorgeous visual component, it comes as a relief to say that the text surrounding the photos are often just as interesting: Written by lifelong Lego Star Wars fans Andrew Becraft and Chris Malloy (contributors to the leading Lego site The Brothers Brick), Ultimate Lego Star Wars is a treasure trove of trivia and information about new pieces, first usage, oddities and occasional mistakes distinguishing various sets from others.

    At a time when online databases such as brickset.com contain exhaustive lists or every single set in Lego history, it’s fair to ask if there’s a place for books such as Ultimate Lego Star Wars. After all, it’s not as convenient as whipping out a cell phone and querying a database. The book is outdated before being published. (The Summer 2017 wave of sets is included, as is the September UCS re-release of the Millennium Falcon, but not the January 2018 sets already on shelves as I write this) But as it turns out, Ultimate Lego Star Wars is the kind of book that serious Lego fans will be happy to hold in their hands. It’s, for lack of a better word, a dense book: every single page is crammed with interesting text or great pictures, and this is the kind of coffee-table book that may take you a while to read given how much time you can spend on each page.

    I write the above review despite not being much of a Lego Star Wars fan—I’ve purchased a few sets, usually at a high discount, but ended up dismantling most of them for spare parts. My interest in Star Wars itself isn’t all-encompassing (I can argue about the series’ problems at length, though), so it’s with some surprise that I like the book so much. I suspect it’s largely because I can recognize a definitive work of scholarship when I see one. Lego Star Wars may be a trivial topic of expertise, but The Lego Group, Dorling Kindersley and the authors have managed to produce a book that lives up to its name. This is the ultimate book about Lego Star Wars. I suspect that even casual readers may get a kick out of it.